Sovereign credit ratings: Guilty beyond reasonable doubt?

Abstract This paper questions the view that credit rating agencies aggravated the East Asian crisis by excessively downgrading those countries. I find that ratings are, if anything, sticky rather than procyclical. Assigned ratings exceeded predicted ratings before the crisis, mostly matched predicted ratings during the crisis period, and did not increase as much as predictions in the period after the crisis. Ratings are also found to react to non-macroeconomic factors such as lagged spreads and a country’s default history. Therefore it is questionable that ratings exacerbate the boom-bust cycle if they are simply reacting to news, whether macroeconomic or market.

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